John Randolph of Roanoke

John Randolph (2 June 1773-24 May 1833) was a member of the US House of Representatives (DR-VA 7) from 4 March 1799 to 3 March 1803 (succeeding Abraham B. Venable and preceding Joseph Lewis Jr.), from VA 15 from 4 March 1803 to 3 March 1813 (succeeding John Dawson and preceding John Kerr), from the 16th district from 4 March 1815 to 3 March 1817 (succeeding John Wales Eppes and preceding Archibald Austin) and from 4 March 1819 to 3 March 1823 (succeeding Austin and preceding James Stephenson), and from the 5th district from 4 March 1823 to 26 December 1825 (succeeding John Floyd and preceding George William Crump), from March 1827 to 3 March 1829 (succeeding Crump and preceding Thomas T. Bouldin), and from 4 March to 24 May 1833 (interrupting Bouldin's terms). He also served as a US Senator from 26 December 1825 to 3 March 1827 (succeeding James Barbour and preceding John Tyler).

Biography
John Randolph was born in Cawsons, Virginia in 1773 to the prominent Randolph family; he was the first cousin once removed of Peyton Randolph and the second cousin of Thomas Jefferson. At the unusually young age of 26, he was elected too the US House of Representatives, serving in the House at various times between 1799 and 1833. He was a quick thinking orator with remarkable wit, and he supported republicanism, a commercial agrarian society, the rights of the landed gentry, and the elitist values of southern Virginia, while he opposed debt and the abolition of entail and primogeniture. He once served as Jefferson's spokesman in the House, but he broke with the president in 1805 due to mistreatment during the impeachment of Samuel Chase, in which he served as chief prosecutor, as well as due to the decay of traditional Jeffersonian values. Randolph vehemently opposed the War of 1812 and the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and he was one of the founders of the American Colonization Society in 1816 to send free blacks to a colony in Africa. He had mixed feelings about slavery, although he believed that it was essential to Virginia, and he depended on hundreds of slaves to work his plantation. However, he arranged for their manumission and their passage to Ohio, where they founded Rossville, now part of Piqua and Rumley. Randolph was known for being passionate about education and equality for all, and he appealed directly to yeoman farmers, who were attached to him despite his personal deficiencies (he had Klinefelter syndrome, leaving him with no beard and a prepubescent voice). He died in 1833.